Even though the Cold War is history, its ghost continues to extract a high price from the world's children.
They remain victims of war and exploitation, of declining economies stripped of resources by military spending and of a spiral of poverty, population growth and environmental degradation-all problems compounded by the distractions of four decades of the Cold War, the United Nations Children's Fund charged Monday in its annual report on the "State of the World's Children."
"At the height of the Cold War, military spending was at about $1 trillion a year, the equivalent of the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of the world's people. But no statistic can measure the damage done to human history or display the panoply of what might have been achieved," UNICEF's report said.
"If one-half or even one-quarter of these colossal resources had been intelligently devoted to social and economic progress, then it may reasonably be assumed that we could now be living in a world in which mass hunger, malnutrition, preventable disease, illiteracy, rapid population growth and a deteriorating global environment would be problems of the past."
Despite the United States' relatively strong economy and its vast resources, the report says, American children have not escaped this decline: The nation's economy grew by 20 percent during the 1980s, but some 4 million more U.S. children fell into poverty at the same time.
At least three American children die of child abuse each day.
And despite the nation's so-called "war on drugs," some 375,000 drug-exposed babies are born each year. About a third of the nation's homeless are families with children, up from 21 percent during the 1980s.
Racial inequality is still apparent in the U.S. statistics, the UN said. While the infant mortality rate for white children is eight deaths per 1,000 births, black infant mortality is 18 deaths per 1,000 births-a rate that is higher than infant mortality in Poland or Cuba.
The report praised the Clinton administration's push for national health care, immunization programs and family leave policies as signs the U.S. is beginning to take the problems of its children seriously and is searching for solutions.
The UN report listed three of the more pressing problems affecting the lives of the world's children:
- About a fifth of the world's population lives in "absolute poverty," hundreds of millions of lives that are becoming increasingly desperate "even as global communications ensure that they are ever more aware of the levels of prosperity in the rest of the world."
- A population growth rate that will quadruple the number of poor people in the world within a single lifetime. Over the next four decades, the report said, the population of sub-Saharan Africa alone will climb from 640 million to 1.6 billion.
- A pattern of consumption and pollution in the industrialized world that threatens serious damage to the biosphere "but which cannot long be denied to those far more populous areas of the world that are likely to make rapid economic progress in the years ahead."
The first and second problems contain the seeds of vast social disorder, UNICEF said, as the numbers of those who live in abject poverty increase-even as the images of elusive wealth and comfort underline their misery.
And in the third case, arguments about the need to protect a delicate environment are unlikely to carry much weight in societies that see rapid, haphazard industrialization as the pathway out of poverty.
Although all these problems are deep and will be difficult to address, UNICEF noted that there have been many areas of success in attacking children's problems, especially health problems, over the past decade.
Deaths from measles, tetanus, whooping cough and diarrhea all declined substantially between 1982 and 1992, largely because of concerted efforts at vaccinations and intervention programs. Education remains essential to improving the health of the world's children, the agency said.
To counter the spiral of poverty, population rise and environmental decline, it suggested increasing the emphasis on education, particularly of young women, who remain the victims of discrimination in much of the world.
Health and nutrition planning would cut the number of child deaths and, over time, undermine the assumption that huge families are an adequate weapon against infant mortality. That would also enhance the chances for the use of birth control to cut the size of families.
"Reversing the spiral demands international action," UNICEF concluded. "In particular, changes in the rules and practices governing trade, aid, debt, investment and technology transfer are necessary to allow the poor world to earn its own living and protect its own future."